Music by Christopher Fulkerson
Text by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

While composing my music theater piece A MIRACLE OF RARE DEVICE, I interrupted the composition of that piece to write this one, so that when the characters in A MIRACLE quote the Coleridge poem, they sing my setting of it. Once this piece was written, I returned to A MIRACLE with no time lost. I felt that since Coleridge tells us the poem is of an actual vision he had, a male voice would be best for this setting. However since a female voice was chosen for A MIRACLE, that piece quotes this one up a major seventh. It would not do to have a style that allows no octaves permit them between compositions.

Whereas A MIRACLE is written in a free and dramatic style, KUBLA KHAN is written in an "architectural" style, in which, like many of my compositions, important details of the setting and their place in the form were carefully planned in advance, employing the secrets of my art. This was done quite deliberately to give it a different tone than the theater piece that quotes it. This setting of KUBLA KHAN is meant to be an "artifact" in the world of A MIRACLE, one that exists as an ideal, formal icon for that world. It is an instance of "melos" in the "drama" of the world of A MIRACLE, or of Platonic perfection in the World of Forms above the world of Manifestation of the world of A MIRACLE. Orphic correspondences, and those between "architecture" and the representation or imagined creation of the miraculous cities seen in A MIRACLE OF RARE DEVICE, are quite intended. By reciting this piece, the character of the Architect invokes the most amazing of the cities in A MIRACLE OF RARE DEVICE, and seeing it sets the two protagonists in greatest consternation. KUBLA KHAN was written in 2002, and is five minutes long.

Many of my compositions are meant to be companion pieces to one another (for more about this see A SKETCH OF THE FESTIVAL) and to those of other composers. This piece is obviously intended to be a companion piece to Le marteau sans maitre by Pierre Boulez.

The score is sixteen pages long, copied in the composer's fair hand.
Hard Copy of the Score is $10.

DOWNLOAD THE SCORE

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Kubla Khan

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But O, that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick parts were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me,
Her symphony and song,
To such deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes in holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

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Updated 1/18/2010.

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